About this site
Fifty notes for people who are paid from another country, written from the position of the person receiving the money. Freelancers, contractors, remote employees, and anybody whose income crosses a border before it reaches them.
What it covers
What a payment instruction actually contains and what it leaves open. What the middle of the journey takes, why none of it is itemised, and how to measure it anyway. What your own statement shows and what it structurally cannot. Why payments are late, why some do not arrive, and who is in a position to answer each question. And what can actually be changed, which is less than people hope and more than most people try.
The argument running through it
You can verify two figures: what was instructed and what landed. Everything between them happens inside institutions that have no relationship with you and no obligation to explain anything. The useful work is therefore entirely at the end you stand on — which currency the amount is named in, whether the agreement is about a sent figure or a landed one, who bears the charges, what date it goes, and who performs the conversion.
What it is not
It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it does not tell anybody what their payment should have been. What a bank or a payment service must disclose, what it must refund, how long a transfer may be held and on what grounds, what rights attach to an incoming payment, who bears a charge in the absence of agreement, and which authority decides any of it all differ by country, by the route the money takes, by the service used and by the facts, and they change. Those are questions for somebody qualified in the place concerned.
The device at the top of every page does not add up the steps it shows, and that is deliberate. Two of them carry no figure, because an amount nobody discloses is not an amount anybody can subtract, and a total would be the one number a reader would act on.
It is also not a comparison of transfer services, a review of any provider, or a recommendation of anybody.
About the figures
Every figure used anywhere on this site is an illustration of what one person recorded about their own payments, labelled as such on the page where it appears. None of it describes any named institution, any named company or any real person, and nothing here claims to say what any bank or authority anywhere would make of anything.
About this domain
What Landed is an independent reference project about the practical record of international payments received by remote workers and distributed teams.